Author Archives: David

Racewars 2017 – 300+ Club

Racewars No Comments

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Racewars 2017 event in Albany & boy was it a great weekend.

Along with my dad & brother we had 3 cars entered, They were:

VE SS A6 with Cam’d & Magnacharge’d 2300 – My Dad’s
VE SS M6 – 402ci LS2/ETP Heads & Harrop 2300 – Brothers
VX Drag Car – 410ci Twin Turbo/TH400 – Mine

My Dad’s car performed flawlessly all weekend & became the stand in when my brothers car died, but there was still a decent photo taken of them together before it did, lol.

Now with my brothers car,  about the 4th or 5th run on the saturday the engine developed a severe miss and shake when running, after pulling the plugs out and finding 1 of them severely damaged (Cylinder 2) we put it on the trailer. 

We didn’t know how bad the damage was going to be until we got it back home and pulled the heads off anyway.

However during the weeks since racewars & between working on it, it was mentioned online that during cleanup the racewars crew had picked up the head of a valve albeit squashed and bent off the runway.

Considering the state of the plug, we were pretty certain it was “ours” & then as sure night comes after day, That’s exactly what we found when we pulled the head off the drivers side. Valve stems still in place by the new springs at least…

Wait a minute, something doesn’t look right….Along with the combustion chamber for that cylinder, the piston had taken a beating. Luckily the bore doesn’t looked to have sustained any major damage, but we haven’t gotten the block off for machining/honing for the new pistons yet so the verdict on the block is unknown.

The annoying thing about all this, is before the event I had just spent a bunch of money on the new valve springs/seats/retainers as the old springs had been on for nearly 8 years or so & since the motor is mine it had been used in 2 of my previous car’s so it was well over due for freshen up.

The pistons i don’t really care about as we had already planned on changing them out after racewars anyway.

So with saturday kinda starting out pretty shit with my brothers car & me originally only planning on doing limited runs in my drag car to save it for the 1000m stuff. I ended up using it a lot more with some passenger rides & testing for the 1000m.

With my brother in the car for a couple of 800m roll-on’s we hit a high 292 & 298 so i was pretty confident of going over 300kph on the sunday. My “idea/plan” leading up to racewars was to get my 300 or more and then put it straight on the trailer, that way i wouldn’t be getting “greedy” with it especially since i still needed the car to compete at another drag racing event on the 22nd of April (3 days away as i write this).

On the Sunday for the 1000m standing starts & with the passenger seat removed the car seemed worse for traction especially for the first 300 meters, I was having to get off or feather the throttle but the 1st run got another 298kph at-least.

Thankfully the 2nd run at 2:29pm got slightly quicker at 302.58kph & with that it went straight on to the trailer.

That is.. When i made it back to the pits… as my battery had gone flat on the return road with the fans on.  As it turns out my alternator even before the event had started to show signs of being on the way out.

1 run fueling would be leaner then what i was commanding in the tune, the next run it would be fine or richer. So i started logging the ecu battery voltage and sure enough the voltage wasn’t consistent.

So i have now put in a new alternator and ran a new sense wire all the way to the battery in the rear & I have 14.6 volts at the battery with the car running vs 12.3v previously which is no good for my fuel pumps & the tune!

Obviously it would worsen depending on how long the car was running for, which at the Motorplex isn’t really that long at each event, but the 8-10 minute drive back through the dirt at Albany was a bit too long to be driving all the electrics.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed reading & watching my sum-what summarized view of the weekend from a racer’s perspective. We’ll be back in Albany again next year with hopefully a couple more of our own 300+kph capable car’s…

Stay Tuned

8.6 1/4 Mile Pass

Drag Racing News No Comments

Went out for some testing during the week with the new gearbox/converter & diff gears in my drag car.

Still launching without the 2 step & trans brake.
5 runs in total with 2 being low 9’s for the warm up run & then a shutdown when it got a bit skate.

3 best runs were:
8.963 @ 249.63kph (17psi)

8.826 @ 252.95kph (17psi)

8.697 @ 257.37kph (20psi)

Drag car still runs stock IRS with a Harrop Enduro cover/gforce1320 stub axles & stock driveshafts & was doing consistent 1.4 – 60’s all night.
Looking forward to changing the diff out for Motul Racewars 2017 to see if it will crack the 300kph mark over the standing 1km & maybe even take out Cash Days 1/8 Mile Racing

2016 RG Colorado Tune

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After test driving my own tuned 2017 Model Colorado with some towing duties, my Dad decided he needed to upgrade from his ZD30 Patrol too, So he went out & purchased a run out 2016 Model before Christmas & so I spent some time on Christmas eve on the dyno.

With just under 100km’s on the clock it was loaded onto the dyno for a couple of baseline pulls before flashing in my new calibration. Power is slightly lower compared to mine but that’s probably due to some slight hardware changes between the years. (mentioned futher below)

So what sold my dad on the Colorado over his existing Patrol? well he simply put a caravan on the back of my car and drove the same hill with a decent grade and noted the speed & throttle difference.

The patrol needed 3rd gear and was maxed out at 65kph with the pedal on the floor. The Colorado? well it did it in 4th gear(auto) & he was having to back off at 85kph so as not to break the speed limit. A pretty convincing test for him.

The main hardware difference between the new 17 model is a 2.75~3″ exhaust stock compared to 2.25~2.5″ for the 16. However the 17 model get’s a DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) after the catalytic converter (which is easily removed and tuned around).

Along with the new engine ecu calibration, I also have a new transmission calibration better suited to towing also loaded in.

VX Drag Car goes 9.2

Drag Racing No Comments

With the fitment of a new 10.5″ Circle’D Converter replacing the old 9.5″ Dominator to my VX Commodore drag car, I ran a new PB in both time and MPH over the 1/4 with no changes to the tune.

9.214

Unfortunately it was my 1 and only run as the drivers side stub axle broke coming out of the burnout box, putting a premature halt to the nights session.

Not too shabby considering that both my VX and my dads VT (which does 9.3’s) are still running stock stubs and axles. So a new one will go and I’ll start to put some more boost in.

VE Ute hits the Strip

Tuning Blog No Comments

Should have updated this one a few weeks ago, so I’ll just do the one big update to bring you up to date on how the car is going.

After the initial re-tune after purchase I took the car down to the motorplex on the 20″ street tyres, best et for the night was an 11.029 @ 205.54kph. Most of the launches were done with 2nd gear to prevent wheel spin, so 60 foot times were nothing to write home about.

ve-ute-street-times

A week or 2 after racing the car on the street tyres, I put on my Racestar drag rims/slicks and took it out for another night of racing.

Ute in Drag Mode

With the slicks on, the car ran 10 second passes consistently. Except the car was badly hesitant off the line on the launches which i knew was because of fluid rushing to the back of the transmission pan.

In the end i got about 5 runs all up with the best being a 10.713 @ 208kph. In the below video you can hear the hesitation just before the 1st shift into 2nd gear.

The following week I took the ute back down, this time with an additional 2 litres of fluid in the transmission and my 4 piston brembo’s on the front of the car (mainly to help with holding the car on the line when stalling up and because stock ve brakes are shit).

This dropped the car’s et by .200 of a second and made it do consistant 1.5 – 60″ footers and run a new pb of 10.57 seconds.
ve-ute-10.57

So that’s it for the 1st big update, the car is now back on it’s 20’s until I upgrade the injectors, add Flex-fuel sensor for running E85 & increasing the boost.

06/07/2016 No More updates on this car, I’ve now sold it as I have another project I want to finish off.

Lazy Tuners

Tuning Blog No Comments

So as mentioned before, I got myself a ve ssv ute loaded with plenty of mods, unfortunately during the previous ownership someone drilled a large 6mm hole in the throttle blade.
tb-hole
Now if your wondering why they did this it’s pretty simple. It was done as a quick fix, laziness or they just didn’t know how to tune the Electronic Throttle & idle control system properly for this camshaft.

The main reason why you would drill a hole in the blade of any car is it effectively allows more air straight into the manifold when the factory bypass won’t flow enough air, or the blade is movement limited.

Now that’s okay to do on the cable operated throttle bodies & even on some very large camshafts you will have no choice but to drill a hole even on a ETC controlled motor, BUT in this case for this particular engine combo it was not required at all. As you often end up creating more problems then you attempt to solve such as; exaggerated lumpy idles, cruise control effect when you back off the throttle, hanging idles when coming down through the revs or to a stop.

To give you an example, below is a screenshot log of my car in-gear with the original idle tune and 6mm hole throttle body from above. (Click to enlarge)
holed-tb

As can be seen in the log there are 2 things that stand out:
1) Large swing in timing & idle rpm
2) High manifold vacuum which leads to poor braking

This is because the ecu is commanding a set idle speed and is than constantly over-shooting then under-shooting it. To fix this the ecu can do 2 things, adjust the timing (reacts quicker) or adjust the tb position (slower reacting) to meet the requested idle speed.

I won’t go into the technical details on how this is fixed, because to most people it wont mean anything but needless to say once a throttle blade with no hole and the idle parameters are setup correctly, the idle ends up being a lot smoother without the excessively noticeable camshaft lope and more vacuum for braking. The results would be the same even with a hole, but only if your tuner has calibrated the relevant tables to compensate for the additional airflow.
stock-tb

9 Second Streeter

News Tuning Blog No Comments

I purchased myself a new toy the other week, a 2009.5 Special Edition SSV Ute with the ambition to run at least one or two 9 second passes down the 1/4 mile with the stock 6L80e automatic trans.

Luckily for me it had already had a good load of money spent on it by the previous owner so the mods list is below:

Harrop FDFI 2300 supercharger & OTR
Comp Cam’d- unknown specs around 228/237 ?
Pedders Coil Overs
Pacemaker 1 7/8 into twin 3″ custom exhaust -nice and quiet when cruising
3.27 diff ratio with trutrak
Mod Plated
TCE 3200 converter (already replaced as it had burnt out the lockup material, more on this later)
trans cooler
20″ rims

VESSVUTE1vessvute2

Stay tuned for more